"In GNOME 3.0, we’re defaulting to suspending the computer when the user shuts the lid, and not providing any preferences combobox to change this. This is what the UI designers for GNOME 3.0 want, and is probably a step in the right direction. We really can’t keep working around bugs in the kernel with extra UI controls."

If your laptop lid is closed but there is an external display attached, the system should not suspend, except for black-listed notebooks. This though cannot be configured from any user-interface setting. However, it looks like there may at least be a dconf / GSettings key that can at least be manipulated to change this behavior.

pm-hibernate & pm-suspend are the commands used to suspend/hibernate, they are part of the pm-utils package.
somehow that package had gone missing on me m/c :-P
installed it, everything is working now ;-)